


Running in Place

by unnieunnie



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Chronic overthinker tries to overthink a good thing, Jongdae wanders into heaven, M/M, Profound lack of self-knowledge, References to past infidelity, Soft city here we come, relationship beginning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:47:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26633845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unnieunnie/pseuds/unnieunnie
Summary: Prompt SWC033"Prompt: Jongdae's life consists of traveling, seeing beautiful places,and discovering hotels and hostels for other travelers. He loves his life but he wishes to have a place to call home - his cold and empty apartment in Seoul doesn't really count - little did he knew that he would find it in a little hostel by the beach in Jeju he didn't intend to stay in and in the warm smile of its owner."
Relationships: Kim Jongdae | Chen/Kim Minseok | Xiumin
Comments: 19
Kudos: 105
Collections: Shall we Chen? Fictional Fest First Round





	Running in Place

“So if you’re looking for an oasis of luxury off the beaten path, check out Recuo Sensível, one of Macau’s hidden (but not for long) treasures.”

Jongdae proofed his article one last time, then sent it to his editor. He padded onto the balcony, which looked out toward the lights of the casino district. Humidity made the air seem sticky, even if it wasn’t that hot. He sipped at the chilled white wine that had appeared magically on his dinner trolley that night, which meant his cover was blown. He’d spent an enjoyable 3 days here so far, lounging by the pool and getting rubbed and anointed head to toe at the spa, but now that they knew he was a travel reviewer, all the perks and coddling would make further stay useless to anybody but billionaire travelers, and they got the same treatment no matter where they went.

Just as well. He was no gambler, even when the money he poured into the casino’s pockets was from his expense account, so Macau was kind of boring. On to the next destination.

The next destination was an adventure hotel on the Longtan River, where he went ziplining and white-water rafting for 4 days. Then he was off to Java, for a 6-day meditation retreat at a hotel next to a gorgeous Buddhist temple; he regretted having to sit on a cushion feeling his butt fall asleep all day long when he could’ve been outside wandering the beautiful forest. Six days of not talking, meals one-third the size he wanted, and lying on his stomach at night waiting for the pins and needles to fade from his ass: Jongdae felt like writing that up into a review that sounded positive was enough of a spiritual struggle that _surely_ he found some tiny corner of enlightenment.

“I can’t believe you survived!” Luhan cackled on the phone when he called on his way to the airport.

“I’ll never sit down again,” Jongdae said. “I’m going to eat all my meals one-handed while walking down the street, like an American tourist.”

“I was so looking forward to hearing about how you exploded from not being able to talk,” Han said.

“Shut up and put me through.”

Jongdae liked _Travel & Adventure_’s receptionist, but the guy was a chaos muppet.

“On your way home?” Yifan asked when he picked up.

For a value of “home” that meant where Jongdae kept his clothes.

“For a couple of days, yeah.”

“Stop by the office and we’ll have lunch.”

Jongdae arrived in Seoul late enough at night that traffic wasn’t too bad. He watched the city roll by the taxi windows. Familiar and strange at the same time. His apartment smelled dusty. He dropped his bags, opened his balcony door to let fresh air in, then frowned at the contents of his refrigerator: kimchi, soju, a rotten pear, and a stack of sheet masks.

The freezer at least had some dumplings and a frozen pizza in it. The pizza was done about the time he finished showering, and eating it was done about the time he had read through his email. The bed linens were a little musty, but that didn’t stop him from sleeping 14 hours straight.

There wasn’t any point in grocery shopping or washing more than the clothes from his trip and whatever sheets and towels he’d need for the time he was home. Everything important to him (laptop, e-reader, picture of his family, passport, wallet) could be carried in his rucksack. His apartment was a glorified closet, and even that was barely used, since he traveled in a series of soft, basic clothes in dark colors, leaving the really nice stuff bought under Zitao’s influence to be lonely and tucked away.

He had dinner with his school friends, which turned into late-night karaoke, so he washed up to brunch with Tao underslept and ready for some hair of the dog to chase his hangover away. Luckily, the first thing Taozi always did was order mimosas.

“You look like shit,” Zitao said, kissing his cheek.

“Baby, I always looked like shit compared to you.”

Jongdae loved watching how Zitao melted and glowed when he was praised. When things had been good between them, Jongdae had thought he could cosset and indulge Taozi forever. There hadn’t been anything he liked better than the way Tao’s cheeks darkened and his eyes lowered over a hesitant smile.

They were lucky to have salvaged a friendship after the ensuing mess. Office romances: never again.

The two of them chatted over breakfast, catching each other up on life, et cetera. Unlike Jongdae’s school friends, whose envy over his travels always made them resentful if he gave away too many details, Tao got it: he knew that travel being a job took a lot of the fun out of it.

“When are you going to quit?”

This took “getting it” to a new level. Jongdae stared.

“Why would I do that? I get paid good money to travel the world. I mean, it’s tiring sometimes, but it’s also basically a permanent vacation, I’d be crazy to give that up.”

“Don’t you ever want to stop and put down roots somewhere? Be able to walk out your front door and see somebody who knows your name? Date?”

Jongdae scoffed.

“Please. What else could I possibly do? I spend half my life in five-star hotels, anything else would seem lame.”

“Sure thing, Daedae,” Zitao said.

They went shopping after brunch, because Jongdae had never been able to tell Zitao no when he batted his eyelashes. And it was fun to paw through fancy watches and try on summer clothes. Jongdae was so distracted by it that he missed when Tao’s mood turned.

“So how’s the shit bastard?” he asked in a deceptively light tone while flicking through a rack of linen shirts.

Jongdae sighed.

“Fine, I guess. We’re having lunch tomorrow to go through my new few months of assignments.”

“Well, give him my ill regards.”

The shopping trip soured after that; within half an hour, Jongdae had his hand on the door of a cab.

“Look,” he said. “Taozi, most of that crap back then was my fault. And I’m sorry about it. I really am. I’m glad we’re still friends, it’d be understandable if you were still just as mad at me.”

Zitao’s glower softened. He reached out to tug at the fabric of Jongdae’s cuff.

“It’s harder to be mad at you, you’re so small and cute,” he said. “But thanks, Daedae.”

Jongdae wandered around his apartment the rest of the day, discontent from the way Zitao’s words ate at him – not just about their relationship mess but also about wanting some kind of home. Because sometimes, when it had been weeks since he last spoke to anyone who didn’t call him “Mr. Kim” or he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten a really good bowl of _doenjang jjigae_ , Jongdae did get kind of wistful for something. He wasn’t even sure what. Just something solid and real.

He met Yifan at the office the next day. Seeing Yifan behind the desk where Jongdae had repeatedly cheated on his boyfriend, occasionally when said boyfriend was at the receptionist’s desk now occupied by Luhan, made Jongdae pretty sure he was the shit bastard one.

Of course, Zitao had been the one who revenge-dated Yifan after they broke up, which made no sense at all, so maybe they were all just stupid.

“Chinese sound good?” Yifan asked, snapping papers into a stack.

“Do you eat anything else? After how many years in Korea?”

“I know what I like.”

Which was: the same restaurant as ever, the same table, the same dish. For the editor-in-chief of a magazine called _Travel & Adventure_, Wu Yifan sure did prefer as much routine as possible. It was a big table, though, and well-suited for Yifan to pull out his laptop to go over ideas for articles while the waitstaff moved silently around them, long familiar with Yifan’s every want, so there was no need for interruption.

And it was Jongdae’s biggest assignment yet: a week in Vancouver, trying out all the stuff to do at the old Olympics site, a train ride across Canada, a review of all the _Anne of Green Gables_ stuff on the eastern edge (“You’re going to have to read at least the first book,” Yifan said), and the train ride back, just to cover both directions. He’d be gone for the better part of a month.

“If this sells as many magazines as we hope, I’m thinking we’ll send you to Belize and Mexico in the fall and then Europe next spring. Play your cards right and you could find yourself based in Barcelona or Lisbon. Maybe start learning French, if you’d rather be in Marseilles.”

There was the travel-writer’s dream, laid out before him in a flow chart, one offshoot of Yifan’s five-year business plan.

“Who’s taking the Japan satellite office?”

Yifan shrugged.

“That could be you, if you don’t want Europe. I just thought you were most likely to want to go farthest afield.”

What did that mean?

Jongdae brooded into his cold noodles for a few minutes and tried not to give in to the suspicion that Yifan was the one who wanted him farthest afield. And the suspicion that he deserved it. He sighed.

“It’ll be great. I’ll make everybody want to knock their neighbor over on their way to get to Canada. Presuming that you put me up in the best spots.”

Yifan grinned and typed.

“Counting on you, buddy. That’s a month away, so what do you want? To catch up on real life or a quick trip over to write about Jeju in the off-season?”

Real life. What the hell did that even mean?

“Jeju,” Jongdae said.

Some trips were nightmares. The meditation retreat in Java had been terrible because he hated sitting still all day every day, that was different. But sometimes, whatever gods were in charge of travel were in a bad mood, and there was nothing anybody could do other than suffer through it. This was why Jongdae always had a few snacks, a tiny first-aid kit, and two separate cases full of charging cables in his rucksack.

Jeju shouldn’t have been far enough away to cause travel hell: there were no jungle rivers full of leeches involved, and he spoke the language. But from the minute he stepped outside his apartment building, Jongdae was dogged by wretched luck. Someone bumped into him while he walked to the subway, spilling iced coffee down his front. The subway car he got on smelled like something had died in it months previously. One of the wheels broke on his roller bag while he climbed the stairs to the airport.

Fighting with his bag made him miss the flight he had tickets for, and the next two flights were full, so he had a 3-hour wait in the airport for his rebooked flight. It also seemed to be the day the airport had chosen to renovate that terminal, and the sound of drills and hammering was so pervasive that it was half an hour into his flight, when his e-reader went black, that Jongdae discovered the outlet he’d plugged into at the airport hadn’t worked.

His laptop died just as they landed. He got in the taxi line, only to have the first driver refuse to take him all the way to the southeastern tip of the island, as did the second. The third one he tried finally accepted, and Jongdae climbed into a car with sprung seats that reeked of old cigarettes and dried squid. He tried to focus on the beauty of the sunset for the whole drive, and not the fact that without too much effort, he could make the car also smell like barf.

Most of the way into the journey, they got caught waiting while about a thousand sheep crossed the road. The driver turned the car off, leaned his seat back, and lit a cigarette to watch the sheep meander past, one after another, for almost forty-five minutes. This was the point when Jongdae’s phone died.

It was well after dark when the taxi dumped him off in front of the brand-new hipster hotel he was supposed to review. It took the driver five tries to get Jongdae’s company credit card to work on his ancient card machine. Jongdae was ready to pull his own hair out by the roots as he dragged his screeching, broken bag into the hotel. It was decorated like a hundred other hotel lobbies, with ostentatious chandeliers, polished white floors that echoed every sound, and sparse, uncomfortable-looking furniture. Jongdae hoped this was one of the places that tended toward soft mattresses and high-powered showerheads, and not rain showers and firm beds.

“Reservation number, please,” the woman at the front desk said.

“I’m sorry, my phone died, so I don’t know. My name is Kim Jongdae,” Jongdae said.

“Sir, our reservations are by number only for privacy, reservation number, please.”

Jongdae stared at her.

“My phone and my laptop both died, so I can’t look it up right now. You can’t look under my name?”

“Reservation numbers only, sir.”

“Well then, can you show me where your business office is so I can charge my phone long enough to get the number?”

“Hotel facilities are for customers only, sir.”

“I _am_ a customer, I just need to charge my phone long enough to get the reservation number!” Jongdae said.

“Until I can verify your reservation with your reservation number, I’m afraid I can’t let you use any hotel services,” the woman said.

They went around in circles about this for long enough that Jongdae felt the desire to lift his suitcase into the air and bring it down as hard as possible on this woman’s head. Instead, he took the kind of deep, calming breath that he had learned in Java. There was no point in reviewing this hotel. He wouldn’t send his worst enemy here.

“Will you at least call me a taxi,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Hotel services are for customers only,” the woman said.

“Oh, fuck off,” Jongdae said, whereupon security threw him out.

Jongdae sat in front of the hotel on the ground, rucksack to his left, suitcase on its side to his right, spent some time dredging up every curse word he’d ever learned in any language, and tossed them up at the night sky. Ahead of him in the dark he could hear the ocean. The hotel sat on a lonely stretch of road with its own private beach, so there was no point in walking toward the water, as it was a facility for hotel customers only, he supposed.

The security guard behind him coughed.

Jongdae gathered his belongings, waited until he was at the edge of the hotel driveway to flip the bird at the security guard, and trudged down the road. His suitcase kept trying to tip over in the direction of the broken wheel, and any time Jongdae got too close to the side of the road, the suitcase would get stuck in sand or gravel. Any time he walked too close to the center of the road, he got paranoid that he’d get run over, even though he only saw one car (which didn’t stop).

He came to an intersection and turned right just because he thought that was still the direction of the beach and on the beach there might be a late-night café or something where he could charge his phone or get directions to another hotel. The asphalt of the road roughened until he kept having to switch arms to drag his suitcase, until it abruptly wedged itself into sand. He looked up and found himself standing in front of a small house with a light shining warmly yellow above the front door bearing a sign that read “Frost Hostel” and under that, a tiny wooden plaque on hooks reading “vacancy.”

For a second, Jongdae thought he might cry.

He wasn’t much of a crier, though. He shook off the wave of emotion that was completely understandable, given how tired he was and what a shit day he had had. He reminded himself that the day wasn’t over yet, and there still might be more crap to come, so he didn’t get too excited as he knocked on the door.

A tall, thin woman with a round face opened the door to him. She looked Jongdae up and down and made a sympathetic grimace.

“Boss always says to keep the light on until midnight for stragglers,” she said. “You’re the first one in six years. Ten more minutes and you would’ve been out of luck.”

“I feel out of luck,” Jongdae said.

“I see that,” the woman said. “Let’s get you to bed so you can wake up luckier tomorrow.”

She introduced herself as Seulgi and made Jongdae sign a battered old register in pen, then helped him drag his suitcase up a narrow flight of stairs.

“Your first bit of good luck,” she whispered. “It’s too late to put you in the bunk room with everyone else, so you get our super fancy suite. And it’s been long enough since anyone showered that the hot water tank has refilled, if you want to clean up.”

The “super fancy suite” turned out to be a narrow private room with bedding and towels in a cupboard and a small writing desk set under a window. At the moment, Jongdae couldn’t imagine a room more welcoming. He thanked her, washed up in the tiny bathroom down the hall, and gratefully set out the traditional bedding on the floor. The sheets smelled like they had dried outside in the sunshine.

Jongdae’s next thought after that was many hours later, and it was much less coherent, being pretty much “nngh, too early.” He burrowed under the blanket. His next thought after that was that he had no idea what time it was, he really needed to pee, and he had forgotten to plug in any of his devices to charge overnight.

So that sucked. Jongdae rectified the charging situation, had his pee, and went in search of other humans. He peeked into the bunk room on his way – walls lined with bunks and the floor in the center strewn with bedding, backpacks, and handheld gaming systems plugged into outlets. Across the hall from the bathroom was a locked door. Pictures of Jeju lined the walls of the hallway and the steep, narrow staircase.

“Seulgi?” he called out when he got to the bottom and saw an empty room.

“I’m afraid not,” a low, masculine voice called out from a doorway Jongdae hadn’t noticed the night before.

“You’re stuck with me this morning.”

Jongdae looked into the face of an angel.

He lived in the worldwide plastic surgery capital, and was a big fan of the trend of male idols sharing their workout videos, so it wasn’t like Jongdae was inattentive to extremely attractive people. Hell, Zitao modeled for his own brand on occasion, and Jongdae had hit that regularly for over a year.

This guy, though. He was like – pocket-sized perfection, a heart-shaped face with wavy dark hair falling over it just so, expressive eyebrows, and lips full enough to inspire sinning.

“You must be our mysterious midnight guest,” the beautiful man said, holding out one hand. “I’m Minseok, the owner.”

Jongdae clasped his hand but also bowed at the same time, like a dork.

The angelic being kindly bowed like a dork too. Clearly very hospitable.

“Jongdae.”

“Welcome, Jongdae,” Minseok said, and Jongdae felt all the previous day’s stress drain away like a wave rolling out.

“You missed breakfast with everyone else. Do you mind sitting in the kitchen?”

Jongdae shook his head and had the mind-bending experience of perching at a small table in front of a beach view while the hottest man in South Korea served him rice, eggs, spicy stew, and about fifteen side dishes, all of which were obviously homemade, in tiny ceramic dishes that were obviously also handmade; washed the dishes; and cleaned the kitchen until it gleamed.

“Now,” Minseok said when Jongdae had finished and everything had been cleaned and put away. “I imagine you didn’t intend to stay with us. Do you have any questions? Or if you’ve got time to tell me how you found us, you’re welcome to help me hang the laundry.”

In a life of fancy hotels and being catered to, Jongdae was charmed by being asked to help with the laundry: for the first few minutes, until the third or so time he got slapped in the face by wet sheets trying to hang them on the line in the stiff ocean breeze. But by that point Minseok was humming, with clothespins held in his mouth, and Jongdae wasn’t about to make himself look like a jerk by complaining or giving up. He hadn’t hung laundry since college, and back then he hadn’t exactly been careful about hanging sheets neatly and smoothing the wrinkles out.

“Thank you,” Minseok said when they were done. “Now tell me how you came to us.”

Jongdae meant to simply say that he’d intended to stay at the hipster hotel, but the way Minseok’s lip curled at its name inspired Jongdae to go on a little rant about their complete lack of customer service.

At the end of that, Minseok laughed: his eyes and nose crinkled up, his gums showed, and he covered his mouth with one hand while he went “ha ha ha” like a manga character. Jongdae ascended to the higher plane of spiritual existence that they had promised him at the Java meditation retreat.

“They’re horrible!” Minseok said. “I actually paid for a room one night to see what it was like.”

“No! Why?”

Minseok shrugged, which made his hair shift over his undercut and made Jongdae’s mouth feel dry.

“Professional curiosity. Everything smelled of bleach, and they don’t let guests control the temperature. I thought I was going to get frostbite. The workout room is nicely equipped, but I rather got the feeling it’s intended as a hookup spot. And that doesn’t even touch the two a.m. rave that apparently went on in the hallway.”

Jongdae grimaced.

“My thoughts exactly,” Minseok said.

He patted Jongdae on the arm.

“I don’t know how long you planned to be on Jeju, but now that you’re in it, that room is yours for as long as you want it. It’s forty thousand won per night, breakfast included. And if you ask me really nicely, I can arrange dinner for you as well for another eight. Once you’ve recovered from your travels, just let me know how long you plan to stay.”

He wandered off with the laundry basket in hand, showing Jongdae a surprising breadth of shoulder and a couple of slim but muscled calves showing between shorts and flip flops.

Well, he was supposed to dig into the amusements of Jeju in the off-season. It wasn’t a luxury boutique hotel, but Jongdae could already see the prose spooling out on the page, making this guest house seem like the apotheosis of chill and cool, until it was like that little Ryokan in Aomori Prefecture he wrote about 3 years ago, which now had a 5-year waiting list, and the original owners had retired to Bali.

Jongdae had a list of activities to do. Of course, the hotel was supposed to arrange all of them for him, and ferry him around in a shuttle. Minseok didn’t have a printer – which explained that grody old register – so Jongdae wrote the list out by hand. He frowned at the map and wondered why in all seven hells that hipster hotel decided to pick the least developed corner of Jeju in which to perform acts of egregious customer service. He had no idea how he was going to get to anything.

“That’ll keep you busy. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather take some time to rest up, since you came in so late? I’ll lend you a beach chair,” Minseok said.

“Thanks, no, I like to keep moving.”

“Okay. Just walk up the beach a bit,” Minseok said. “My brother’ll help you out.”

“Your brother? Where?”

“Up the beach,” Minseok said.

He patted Jongdae’s arm, and Jongdae absolutely did not do anything embarrassing like get goosebumps from it.

“You can’t miss him.”

This was about 10% of the level of information Jongdae usually liked to have before setting off on a jaunt, but Minseok smiled so brightly, with his arms full of precisely folded sheets, that Jongdae couldn’t muster enough unhappiness for complaint. He sighed, wriggled into his flip-flops, put on a hat, and set off up the beach.

The surf on his feet was cold, but the sun and sand were warm. There were only a few other people – a couple of old men fishing, a family spread out on blankets, and some solitary walkers. The breeze was steady, and a few puffy clouds scudded by. If nothing else, it was a nice walk up a lonely beach with nothing to look at but sand and the sea.

Then he rounded a corner and heard music.

As it turned out, he wouldn’t have been able to miss the beachside café-slash-surf rental shop. The shop itself looked like most other beachside shops: weather-beaten wood with paint scoured by sand, wide shutters thrown open to let in the wind, and a deep, shady porch. An empty rack for surfboards sat outside, with bodyboards and skimboards stacked nearby, a tangled-up mess that Jongdae thought was the kite part of a kite board. The music was loud, and two very little clothed, very handsome men were wrestling over a rugby ball. The effect was more enhanced than ruined by the fact that they were both giggling like middle school-age girls. He watched them for a couple minutes, then cleared his throat, and they sprang apart.

“Sorry,” the paler of the two said. “Are you, um? Here to rent a surfboard?”

“To book a lesson, actually, and maybe see about some lunch,” Jongdae said.

The two guys grinned. Jongdae wondered how this corner of Jeju had gotten so overrun with good-looking men. Not that either of these held a candle to Minseok, but still. If he were back in Seoul, he’d be giving himself a panic attack trying to decide which one of these dudes to buy drinks for and probably bankrupt himself and his liver doing so for both.

“Lessons and lunch we can do, as long as you don’t mind crab noodles,” the darker-skinned one said.

“It’s either that or packaged sandwiches, but they’re not very good,” the pale one said.

“Crab noodles, obviously, then,” Jongdae said.

He followed them onto the shaded porch of the shop and sat at the sandy bar. In the back, he could see a small shop crowded with the t-shirts, sun hats, and sandals of every beach shop, along with a section of convenience store snacks and supplies.

“Where’d you come from?” the tanned man said. “We don’t get too many people just walking up the beach who didn’t mean to come here for a surfboard.”

“Frost Hostel.”

The young man’s grin was so bright that Jongdae almost put his sunglasses back on.

“Hyung sent you! Anything he said about the food is a lie, Sehun and I are perfectly good cooks.”

“You’re Minseok’s brother?”

He nodded.

“Jongin.”

He held out his hand to shake.

“We don’t look too much alike, do we? Both my brothers tell me I’ll look like our grandpa by the time I’m thirty, but nothing they say can make me stay off the beach.”

“And he’s too lazy for proper sunscreen application, like _some_ of us,” the other one said as he set a bowl of crab noodles in front of Jongdae.

Jongdae looked at Jongin’s arresting face – there was something in their similarly full lips, the way their high cheekbones narrowed downward, and strong brows. Jongin shrugged.

“I don’t want to have to wait to get in the water.”

Jongdae enjoyed listening to the two of them rib each other while he ate. This was one the best parts of insinuating himself with locals: it gave Jongdae a real sense of where the most authentic action was. Halfway through lunch a crowd of young guys trooped in, wearing wetsuits peeled down around their waists, with dripping hair. They crowded the other end of the bar, laughing and demanding food and drinks.

“You gotta take a surf lesson, man!” one of them said to Jongdae.

Between their boisterousness and Jongin’s bright smile, Jongdae found himself agreeing to an early surf lesson with Sehun the next morning. Jongdae shrugged to himself – it had been on his to-do list for the hipster hotel, anyway.

“Oh no, their lessons aren’t through us,” Sehun said when he asked. “They do everything for themselves, up on their ‘private’ beach.”

His finger quotes were damningly sarcastic.

“They have crap waves from that jetty they built to keep us riffraff out. Breaks the whole surf line. Plus Nini and I are a hell of a lot more fun to hang out with.”

“I believe it,” Jongdae laughed.

He wandered up the beach for a while after his excellent lunch, finding a few weathered houses and a grandpa fishing from a low chair set in the surf. By the time he worked his way back down to Jongin’s shop, the young men were all back in the water, demonstrating very little surfing skill but obviously having a great time. Jongdae sat on the sand and watched for a while. Eventually Sehun ran out and stabbed a beach umbrella into the sand behind him.

“Free for today just because you’re nice,” Sehun said.

By the time the surfers walked out of the water, Jongdae’s back had begun to ache from sitting hunched over, and his brain was buzzing with the story he was already starting to write. He could totally see the way it would come together – would already be coming together if he hadn’t left his phone on the charger back at the hostel.

Speaking of which, the surfers turned out the be the inhabitants of the bunk room. Jongdae let them talk him into riding back in their sand-filled rental van. He agreed with them all that Minseok was “the chillest dude.” He didn’t quite commit to joining them later to check out a rumored bar several kilometers up past Nini’s place where there was dancing.

He spent the rest of the afternoon happily working on his story, until a couple of the tall surfer kids almost knocked the door down calling him to dinner. They were great adventure companions over the next few days, even if Sehun fussed at him on the phone for postponing his surf lesson: he wrote up blurbs about two little family-run restaurants, the dance club, and the tiny local _haenyo_ museum. He even tracked down and interviewed a couple of the lady divers, both in their 80s, and got great pictures. Every minute that he wasn’t poking his head somewhere to add to his story, he was typing away at the little desk under the window in his room.

The surfer kids left 3 days later, taking his transportation with them. Jongdae took advantage of the quiet to write for a while, then take a nap. He finally took Minseok up on the offer of dinner.

In the intervening days, he’d forgotten about Minseok’s face. The grin stopped him in his tracks, like he’d been struck by lightning. Jongdae wandered around his room slightly bemused, trying to decide when it would be close enough to dinner that he could hang around Minseok without it being weird, in the hope of seeing that crooked, gummy smile again.

He probably was too early, but Minseok let Jongdae trail after him anyway – even put him to work putting side dishes into little bowls. The two of them sat outside watching the ocean grow dark as the sun set behind them, talking about not much in quiet voices, until Minseok leaned over and kissed him.

Jongdae went stiff with surprise before he melted into the softness of Minseok’s mouth against his own.

“Sorry,” Minseok said afterward, sounding zero percent apologetic. “The way your mouth turns up at the corners is just so cute.”

“Cute, huh?” Jongdae said.

Minseok smiled again, kissed him again, took him to bed, took him apart. Left him a couple hours later to complain about the cold bed and wet sheets to clean up the dishes from their meal, but dragged Jongdae out of the small upstairs bed later and tucked him under one arm in freshly changed sheets under a window on the first floor.

“You don’t mind?” Jongdae whispered, watching the curtain billow above them.

He hadn’t slept next to anybody since the Zitao days. Of course, he’d only been people’s vacation hookup since then. Jongdae tried to be restless, but his head fit perfectly onto Minseok’s shoulder, and the waves rolled just outside. He thought about how Minseok had smiled at him when he came, and how Minseok’s fingers had tangled in his hair, but he never pulled or pushed Jongdae’s head until he choked. How Minseok had asked several times, “is this all right?” and kissed him with a sweetness that made Jongdae’s belly clench at the memory of it.

Minseok’s arm tightened around him, and he placed another of those kisses to the top of Jongdae’s head. Jongdae snuggled in and stopped fighting the weird comfortableness of it.

The light was pale in the sky when he woke up to Minseok trying to slide carefully out from under him.

“Sorry,” Minseok whispered. “Gotta make breakfast.”

“I have a surfing lesson,” Jongdae mumbled.

Minseok smiled, and Jongdae sat up from the rush of his rapid heartbeat.

“I guess I’m not sorry, then,” Minseok said, and kissed Jongdae’s cheek, making a whole new rush of cardiac overactivity.

Minseok sent him off down the beach with nothing more than tea and _juk_ , but the promise of a feast later. He also sent Jongdae off with a very thorough kiss, which sort of seemed like the feast itself.

The dim morning light made the water look steel-grey, the sun huge and red on the horizon while Jongdae walked down to the surf shop. He found Sehun talking to an even taller, lanky guy with shaggy reddish hair, holding a neon green longboard that looked almost 3 meters tall.

“This is Chanyeol,” Sehun said. “He is _not_ your surfing instructor, which isn’t going to stop him from butting in his opinion every twenty seconds.”

Chanyeol grinned while shaking Jongdae’s hand in one enormous paw.

“I’ll shut up if you tell me to,” he said. “Sehun doesn’t count, I used to babysit him in middle school.”

“For a value of babysitting that equals sitting me in front of a stack of comics while you played on my gaming system.”

“Which you loved,” Chanyeol said.

“Can you believe my mom paid him for that?” Sehun appealed to Jongdae.

“Seems like kind of a sweet gig,” Jongdae laughed.

“Just for that, you have to wear the red wetsuit,” Sehun said with a glare.

The red wetsuit _was_ pretty obnoxiously red, but it fit so well that Jongdae figured he would’ve worn it even without the teasing. Sehun handed him a pale surfboard almost as long as Chanyeol’s when he stepped back out onto the sand.

“I can’t use a shorter one?”

By the end of Chanyeol’s speech about stability, surface tension, and a bunch of the kinds of vocabulary that had given teenage Jongdae a horror of science class ran out of steam, he was glad Sehun had warned him.

“Longboards don’t tip over as easily,” Sehun said.

Chanyeol made a noise of disgust and stomped off into the water. While Sehun made Jongdae set his board in the sand and practice popping up until his arms burned, Jongdae watched Chanyeol swim out to beyond the wave break and sit on his board, just staring.

“Are the waves not any good this morning?” Jongdae asked when they finally headed out into the cold sea, Jongdae pushing his board.

“He’s just feeling the water,” Sehun said. “Some people get really spiritual about surfing. Channie has deep feelings and shit about the sea.”

Trying to surf was mostly just exhausting. Sehun made him lie on the board and paddle until he was panting, then watch the waves while he caught his breath, then practice popping up to his feet while Sehun held the board relatively still. Jongdae fell off twice.

But they watched Chanyeol catch a few waves, cutting across in slow, graceful curves with his hands splayed out in front and behind him.

“You’ll get there,” Sehun said.

It took a couple of hours, and a bunch more plunges into the water. But he got used to lying on the board craning his head back, trying to gauge what would make Sehun yell “paddle! paddle!” He got used to pulling through the water, and a couple of times he felt the wave catch under him and pull him along. The fourth time that happened, he popped up right away when Sehun shouted, he kept to his feet, and he stayed upright, laughing at how the water pulled him to shore, smooth as anything.

Sehun and Chanyeol both whooped and hugged him; Jongdae couldn’t stop grinning. He got in a couple more short rides before his arms were ready to give out.

“You did awesome,” Sehun said. “Definitely take a hot bath, you’ll be sore as hell tomorrow.”

Jongdae intended to write it all down the minute he returned to the hostel, but Minseok had spicy pollack soup and rolled eggs waiting for him, all of which vanished before Jongdae had time to register how starving he was. Then he yawned so hard his jaw cracked, and he didn’t even protest being pushed into Minseok’s room for what he thought would be a short nap. When he woke, the sun was high behind the house, so he’d been out for hours.

He groaned when he moved – Sehun had been right about the soreness. Jongdae stumbled out into the kitchen to see Chanyeol again. His eyebrows lifted above a bright smile at Minseok, who shrugged, even if his cheeks were pink.

“Just bringing over Min’s farm share,” he said to Jongdae’s question.

Jongdae’s journalistic curiosity couldn’t let that go without any explanation. Minseok very nicely put bowls of kimchi and rice in front of him while Chanyeol talked about his boyfriend’s farm-slash-restaurant, but also his boyfriend’s … pottery studio?

“Does this guy ever sleep?”

Chanyeol and Minseok both laughed. Jongdae wondered how he kept forgetting what Minseok looked like with that smile on this face. It must’ve been powerful enough to kill brain cells.

“Two different guys,” Chanyeol said. “You should come see. Baek’s got a show coming up next month, there’s lots of work ready, and Soo’ll make us lunch.”

“Yeah, sure,” Jongdae said, ruining yet another day’s schedule of research for his article.

Jongdae meant to spend the afternoon writing up his surfing experience, but Minseok needed help washing the dishes, and then he noticed Jongdae’s wince rolling out his shoulders. He pulled Jongdae into a room in the back of the hostel that held a soaking tub. He scrubbed Jongdae while the tub filled, then pulled Jongdae against him when they climbed into the hot water and rubbed the knots out of his muscles. Rubbed a few other things, too, and finished off back in Minseok’s bed, emerging only to eat dinner outside in front of the waves and sleep again in one another’s arms.

They spent most of the next day in the rambling old seaside house where Chanyeol lived. Minseok produced a very small, immaculately clean, and ancient car from seemingly out of thin air; during the 15-minute drive up the beachside road, Jongdae learned about Minseok’s love of girl group pop. Jongdae saw the pink in Minseok’s cheeks. He belted out the lyrics and was rewarded by Minseok’s grin.

Chanyeol’s house was a low, old-fashioned house with a long porch running along one side, but the traditional thatched roof replaced by tiles. It sat on a small rise looking out over the sea, with a broad garden out back, a triple row of fruit trees between the plants and the sea. It was a calm, green place next to the glare of the beach. Chanyeol met them at the door, a small black poodle under each arm, a corgi trying to wriggle between his ankles, and a grey poodle zipping out the door, straight into Minseok’s grasp.

“You’ve met the children,” Chanyeol laughed.

Jongdae hadn’t grown up with pets, and of course he wasn’t home enough even to keep a plant alive. But the dogs suited that rambling house, all of them low to the ground and sliding across the immaculate wooden floors. Kyungsoo was small and serious, and seriously handsome. Chanyeol smiled at him as if he was the closest source of light.

Kyungsoo seemed shy, but Jongdae was a journalist, used to worming information out of people. Soon he was having a tour of the back garden and meeting the two teenagers who were currently weeding.

“It’s barely more than a hobby garden,” Kyungsoo said under the shade of a pear tree. “There’s enough to put something home-grown on every menu, but it’s not self-sustaining. It’s all a business of networking, you know? Which crabbers want to trade farm jobs in the off-season for better prices, who’s willing to run their goats or sheep on my field in the winter to build up the soil, and are they willing to give me a good price on cheese.”

“Sounds pretty mercenary,” Jongdae grinned.

Kyungsoo’s smile was as sweet and bright as it was unexpected.

“I was in advertising, back in Seoul,” he said while they walked back in the kitchen door.

“Soulless and miserable,” Chanyeol said from behind the counter, chopping an onion.

“Soulless and miserable,” Kyungsoo agreed.

He tied an apron around his waist and knocked Chanyeol out of the way. The four of them chatted easily while the kitchen filled with the scents of something delicious. Minseok seemed as at home as the house’s inhabitants, and Jongdae found himself drawn in to the ease of it all.

Just when Jongdae thought he might perish of hunger, Kyungsoo flapped the dishtowel at his waist.

“Myongrong!” he said, “fetch Baek! Go fetch Baek!”

The corgi barked once and scrambled down the hallway. Jongdae watched his furry butt disappear, then soon after heard another bark, a voice protesting, and a bark again, followed by “okay, okay!”

“Chew toy’s here,” the newest arrival said, then tripped over the corgi nudging at his ankles and left a muddy handprint on the wall.

Baekhyun still had a smear of mud on his face and one in his hair after he washed up and presented himself for introduction to Jongdae. The corgi was still trying to herd him, so Baekhyun moved very gingerly around the crowded kitchen.

Jongdae was a veteran of many things too short to be called “relationships” and a couple of longer-term things that involved lots of angst and melodrama, often of his own making. He didn’t think anyone had ever gazed at him with the quiet affection in Chanyeol’s expression when he reached over and picked the mud off Baekhyun’s cheek.

“Hey, that was my skin treatment,” Baekhyun laughed, but he grabbed Chanyeol’s hand and kissed his knuckles.

Fingers interlaced with his, and Jongdae’s breath caught in his throat.

“Come see the dining room,” Minseok said.

The room was tiny, only 4 tables topped by white cloths, and large windows facing the sea. They stood looking out, holding hands.

“This is lovely,” Jongdae said.

“Yes,” Minseok said, although when Jongdae turned his head, Minseok was looking at him, not the view.

The door clattered; Minseok let go to help bring dishes in. Jongdae rubbed his fingers.

Lunch was delicious, spread out across the table closest to the window. Baekhyun and Chanyeol were such easy talkers that Jongdae found himself back in journalist mode, until he knew all about their having grown up locally, the music lessons and odd jobs Chanyeol worked to feed his surfing habit, Baekhyun’s art lessons and growing career as a potter, and how for 10 minutes Chanyeol thought his heart would be broken when his best friend came back from a show in Seoul with a cute boy in tow, except that said cute boy thought Chanyeol was cute too.

They made it sound so easy. They made it look easy, bantering with each other and Minseok, calling each other “babe” and “dorkwad” in equal measure. Something about it made Jongdae’s chest ache, which he figured he could cover up with work.

“Do you mind if I take some pictures?” he asked. “I’d like to include this place in my article. Oh, for _Travel & Adventure,_ I’m a staff writer. Don’t worry, I definitely only have great things to say, this has been – “

“Please don’t,” Kyungsoo said.

The faces around the table weren’t smiling anymore. It was not the reaction Jongdae was used to, on the rare times when he outed himself as a writer for the pan-Asia travel magazine that dictated what was cool to the rich and bored.

“Oh – kay?” Jongdae said.

The silence was long and wretched, and nobody would look him in the eye until Baekhyun arched one eyebrow and said,

“You can write about my amazing pottery all you want, though. Come see!”

It _was_ really cool pottery, and Jongdae was pretty sure it wasn’t just his relief saying so: uneven pots with interesting glazes that might suggest the silhouette of a dog from one angle and a mountain from another, fussy-looking teapots with abrupt angles, and big sculptures that were lumpy like the sandcastles kids made by dripping wet sand through their fingers.

“Very cool,” Jongdae said, after he’d taken a few pictures.

“Thanks, it keeps my hands busy,” Baekhyun said. “And hopefully, with this next show, my bank account.”

He laughed.

“Want to see my best-seller?”

At Jongdae’s nod, Baekhyun handed over a plain, rounded little pot filled with M&Ms.

“Cute.”

“You have to use it,” Baekhyun said.

Jongdae put his fingers in the bowl to scoop up some candy and found that his fingers brushed up against the rounded inside edge, which tilted at just the right angle to tip the candies into his fingers without him even trying.

“Oh, clever,” he said.

Baekhyun laughed.

“Yeah. I sell dozens of these things during the summer. Set up a little table on the beach not too far from the public bathrooms, smile a lot, and pay for half a year’s worth of clay and glazes by the end of the season. The irony of it kills me when I’m wrestling with a sculpture nobody will ever buy.”

“That’s why I stopped writing novels,” Jongdae said, and then shut his mouth with a snap.

“You know what’s good for failed novelists? Surfing,” Chanyeol said from behind them.

Baekhyun rolled his eyes.

“You think surfing is the cure for every spiritual malaise.”

“It is.”

Kyungsoo stood back, frowning.

“Hey, I overstepped, I’m sorry,” Jongdae said.

Kyungsoo shook his head.

“Come have dessert,” he said.

He waited until everyone was tucking into the yuzu-glazed pound cake before he looked out the window and said,

“I’m only open two days a week,” he said. “Four tables, one sitting.”

“Basically a dinner party for locals with something to celebrate and any tourist lucky enough to get lost by our front door at just the right time,” Chanyeol laughed. “He only makes any profit because he does all the work and pays his dishwashers in flesh.”

Kyungsoo’s pinch looked painful, but Chanyeol kept laughing.

“You don’t want to expand?” Jongdae asked.

Kyungsoo shook his head.

“I’ve done the grind. Eighty-hour weeks and infinite moving parts. This is, like – “

Kyungsoo’s cheeks went dark, and he leaned toward Baekhyun, grabbed Chanyeol’s hand.

“It’s like living in heaven, here. I’m not going to miss out on it by working too much.”

This was so far outside Jongdae’s world. He tried to imagine Kris giving up ever-increasing subscriptions and advertising budgets, and failed. He tried to imagine Zitao giving up the hustle of design, shows, and sponsors. He tried to imagine himself: some people would say he spent most of his time in heaven, in spas and fancy resorts.

Jongdae watched the way Kyungsoo’s lovers embraced him and couldn’t work up much care about subscription numbers. He helped clear the table and wash the dishes. The smallest dog got a case of the zooms, and he watched Chanyeol chase it around the kitchen until Baekhyun yelled,

“Toben! Sit!”

And Chanyeol very nearly fell over himself in the effort not to trip over the suddenly-still poodle. Jongdae laughed with everyone else. He nodded to Minseok at their offer of beers and fruit on their shady terrace and let himself be questioned for once. He told them all about his travels, the fancy hotels and the mishaps. The horrible hotel up the road, and his upcoming train trip across Canada.

“Anne of Green Gables,” Minseok mused. “I read that, in high school. A girl I liked said it was her favorite book.”

“You liked a girl?” Baekhyun asked.

Minseok cut a thin slice of plum and ate it with the most elegant gestures Jongdae had ever seen – and he had once sat next to minor European royalty at a swim-up bar in Tahiti.

“I am a man of many affections,” Minseok said.

His three neighbors howled.

“You liar,” Chanyeol said. “You probably had to clear cobwebs out of your mouth before the first time you kissed Jongdae.”

Jongdae couldn’t bear the pink in Minseok’s cheeks, or the way he glowered at the ground. Who was he, to stick up for Minseok, after this week or so of whatever this was? But still.

“Birds of a feather, you know how it is,” Jongdae said. “Our cobwebs suited one another.”

They laughed, but Minseok’s forefinger curled around Jongdae’s pinkie, and he was pleased. Pleased to sit in the sea breeze with friendly people and a full belly and talk about lots of nothing. Pleased when Kyungsoo said,

“Oh! I’m driving Baek to Seoul for his show the day after tomorrow. I don’t know what your plans to go back were, but you’re welcome to ride with us.”

Pleased to accept, until he thought about actually leaving, and he saw the downturn of Minseok’s mouth.

“Let’s walk,” Minseok said when they arrived back at the hostel.

There was another van outside, Seulgi cheerful behind the desk, and the clatter of a crowd upstairs. They walked. Before they were out of sight of the hostel, Minseok took Jongdae’s hand.

“Did you want to write about the hostel, too?”

Jongdae thought about how similar in size their hands were and how comfortably they fit together.

“I did,” he said. “I won’t if you don’t want me to.”

“I don’t.”

He’d never asked before whether the owners of places he wrote about wanted to make it onto the must-go lists of the idle travel set. He’d just assumed everyone wanted more business, more reservations, a bigger payday.

He’d thought the payday was the point, until a former advertising drone turned small-time beach farmer said something different.

“I’m sorry,” Jongdae said.

Minseok stopped and pulled at him until they faced each other.

“No harm done,” he said. “You haven’t resigned me to the misery of endless bookings, after all.”

“I never want you to be miserable,” Jongdae blurted, then scuffed his toes in the sand.

Minseok reached up and touched his cheek softly.

“You’ll be out of luck the day after tomorrow, then,” he said.

And what was he supposed to do with that? He had to go back to real life sometime. He couldn’t just stay here, like Kyungsoo, and putter around the hostel paying for his bed and board with blow jobs.

He could return Minseok’s kiss, though, rush back to the hostel, and see about a blow job, even if it wasn’t payment for anything other than a really good day.

Twenty-four hours earlier, Jongdae would’ve said he wanted time to write his story. Twelve hours earlier, he would’ve said he wanted time to memorize every inch of Minseok’s skin before he had to leave.

He was always going to have to leave. Go back to Seoul, go to Canada, take over the desk in Tokyo or Barcelona or Marseilles and keep on wandering, keep on writing stories and making places hip, then going on his way before the crowds arrived.

Minseok had a second brother, though, and he arrived in the morning of the last day.

Jongdae was exhausted from a very pleasant lack of sleep, and even Minseok looked tired. He huffed to himself when the silver Audi pulled up in front of the hostel, but then he shrugged and put a smile on his face.

Minseok’s older brother, Junmyeon, was model-handsome and bit back his obvious curiosity at meeting Jongdae. Once they retreated to the kitchen to go over the hostel’s finances, though, Jongdae was left to walk up the beach with Junmyeon’s partner, Yixing, who wasn’t nearly so polite.

“How long have you been here?” he asked before they’d gotten out of the yard.

“About a week.”

“And which of you is the fast worker?”

Yixing’s smile was so bright that Jongdae wondered whether the wickedness in his tone was a mirage.

“Er,” he said.

Yixing laughed.

“Minseok!” he said. “I knew it! You’re awfully cute, I don’t blame him.”

Jongin and Sehun raced toward them with bright smiles, and nobody seemed to mind Jongdae’s intrusion of the family reunion. He sat with them at the small bar, drinking terrible coffee and listening to everyone catch up, walked back a bit later and watched Jongin get gently fussed at by Junmyeon for his taped-together flip-flops and ragged hair.

“Nobody cares, hyung,” Jongin said, fondness deepening his voice. “And I’m not going to learn to care either, which is why I’m staying here forever.”

“At least moisturize,” Junmyeon said, rolling his eyes.

“Yes, hyung.”

When Minseok left to attend to the guests’ breakfast, Jongdae was subjected to a hundred questions about himself.

“ _Travel & Adventure!_” Junmyeon cried. “Oof, if only we had the staff and budget to take advantage of that!”

“Seokkie would never want that,” Yixing said.

“Nini would never want that,” Jongin said.

Junmyeon looked over at Jongdae with a wry expression.

“Our mother was an economics professor. I turned into a banker, and my brothers into anti-capitalists.”

“It makes for very vigorous conversations over the dinner table,” Yixing laughed.

Hanging out with them wasn’t like the usual glomming onto groups when Jongdae traveled – of course, he couldn’t buy a round of drinks on his company card to grease the wheels, but it never seemed necessary. Like it had been the day before, everyone accepted his presence as a given and made space next to him when Minseok returned.

It was so comfortable that Jongdae wriggled with discomfort, which only increased during the course of the day. He wanted to be alone with Minseok, but his family crowded the kitchen, and the group of new guests (a bunch of girls whose boyfriends had all recently enlisted) crowded the rest of the hostel.

He wanted to get the farewells out of the way and just leave.

Once, Jongdae scared the hell out of himself, thinking “but what if I just stay?”

After that, he slipped away from the conversation to go upstairs, plug in all his devices, and pack. The quiet helped with his franticness, but it made him even more grumpy.

Junmyeon and Yixing left midafternoon to head back to Jeju City. Jongin and Sehun lingered a while longer, helping Minseok clean up and teasing with Seulgi after she arrived.

“When are you coming back?” Sehun asked at one point.

Jongdae was unable to move for a moment. He was grateful that Sehun had chosen a moment when Minseok was out of the room.

“I mean, I guess you could just fade into a pleasant memory,” Sehun continued, then gathered up a stack of clean sheets.

“That would be stupid, though,” Jongin said, grabbing half the stack and following Sehun out into the hall.

He was broody the rest of the day – and he hated being so, because it wasn’t Minseok’s fault that the hostel was full of demanding guests and unexpected visitors and that he himself had this whole life he had to return to, with 5-year growth plans, frequent flyer bonuses, and bottle service in VIP lounges.

“Let’s leave a light on,” Minseok said that night, when everything was finally quiet and the door to his bedroom was closed behind him.

And it wasn’t that Jongdae was self-conscious or embarrassed about his body. It was the way Minseok looked at him: solemn, those beautiful eyes gazing straight into his heart. It was the way Minseok’s fingers traced his jaw, his neck, his chest so tenderly, as if Minseok was trying to memorize what it felt like. And the beauty of Minseok’s face in the dim gold light of the bedside lamp, the flutter of the white curtain, the sound and smell of the sea. Jongdae trembled, afterward, throat sore from the cries muffled behind Minseok’s hand, and his face was wet.

He thought he could shatter into a million pieces without much effort. And what would be left of him, if he did?

Jongdae rolled over into Minseok’s arms and hid his face in the curve of Minseok’s shoulder until the world felt solid again.

“What did we do here?” Jongdae asked next to Minseok at the stove in the morning, when they were both still glowy from a morning round and still damp from the showers afterward.

The kind of question he never would’ve asked if he’d already had a cup of coffee and let his good sense to wake up. But Minseok turned that calm gaze on him, and Jongdae’s panic receded.

“Making some very pleasant memories, I hope,” Minseok said.

“Is that it?”

Minseok tilted his head to the side. He reached out to take the spoon from Jongdae’s hand, turned the stove off, and wrapped his arms around Jongdae’s waist.

“Isn’t that enough?” he said, chin resting on Jongdae’s shoulder. “To know that you’ve been like a week with extra sunlight in it for me.”

There was that sense of cracks forming all around him again, and Jongdae’s breath was unsteady.

“You don’t want?”

Minseok stepped back and looked at him.

“Want to carry you over my shoulder into my room to keep you there until neither of us can move? Absolutely. Want to stand over this stove and talk until I know every last detail about you? Of course, Jongdae. I’ve had the merest taste of you, of course I want more.”

“But you didn’t ask.”

“I won’t.”

Jongdae stared.

“Jongdae. How could I? We don’t live in a movie – this is real life, you have responsibilities elsewhere, and all my responsibilities are here. It wouldn’t be fair of me to ask you to give up anything for me, just because I want to kiss you from dawn to midnight. It would be selfish of me to lay that burden on you.”

He pushed Jongdae’s hair off his forehead. Jongdae grabbed his hand and kissed it.

“I’ll enjoy the wistfulness of missing you. Knowing that our time together was uniformly good.”

While he was kissing Minseok, Jongdae could pretend that he agreed. He slipped away in time to look like just another guest in the breakfast room, and once the women were off for their daily jaunt, they sat on the porch, Jongdae tucked up under Minseok’s arm, until Kyungsoo arrived.

He kind of hated the pitying smile on Kyungsoo’s face after Minseok kissed him for the last time.

“You’re in the front, Baek was up all night finishing everything.”

Baekhyun was already stretched across the back seat of Kyungsoo’s battered SUV, one arm thrown over his face. The drive took longer than flying, of course, but the company was pleasant and the view from the ferry beautiful. Kyungsoo listened to a lot of indie music, and he wasn’t afraid to let the conversation lull.

“Min usually goes for older guys,” he said once. “But you two looked really cute together.”

“He’s great,” Jongdae said, not knowing what else he could say without erupting into a bunch of stuff that would be ridiculous and uncomfortable.

“He is,” Kyungsoo said.

“The best,” Baekhyun mumbled from the back seat.

Kyungsoo dropped him off in front of his apartment building and refused the offer of Jongdae taking them to lunch, though he did demand Jongdae’s phone.

“You should come to the show day after tomorrow. I’ll text you the details.”

They were restless days. Jongdae paced around his apartment, sat in the nearest coffeeshop and drank far too many lattes while he put together a breezy, stupid story about the dance club and the _haenyo_ museum: all the parts of his trip that didn’t mean anything at all. He also wrote up a really mean-spirited review of the hipster hotel, but he only mailed that one to Luhan, with the subject line “DO NOT USE.”

“Did you write this in your sleep,” Kris wrote back.

“Basically,” Jongdae answered.

Baekhyun’s show was packed; by the time Jongdae arrived, only 45 minutes after the start time, half the pieces had red stickers beside them. Baekhyun looked like an angel in a slim-cut suit and just a little shine on his eyelids to match the shine of his smile. He kissed Jongdae’s cheek and pushed him toward the open bar, where Jongdae found Kyungsoo lurking.

“No Chanyeol?”

Kyungsoo grinned.

“I’m starting to suspect he’s some kind of magical sea creature who can’t actually leave the coast. I’m in charge of taking pictures, which I’m terrible at, please help.”

Jongdae was happy to have something to do that wasn’t asking Kyungsoo questions like “are you happy” and “how did you know you wanted to give it up” et cetera. And it was fun to go out with them afterward, to one of the high-end restaurants Jongdae liked when he wanted to impress people, and sit in a private room over a very fancy spread to enjoy Baekhyun’s excitement.

“Babe!” he kept saying, hugging Kyungsoo around the neck. “Babe, I can’t believe they all sold.”

“I believe it,” Kyungsoo said. “You’re a genius, it just took the world a little while to catch up.”

Baekhyun narrowed his eyes.

“Just you wait until we get to our fancy hotel room, mister.”

Jongdae laughed. They were so comfortable, both to be with and together. Baek was bounding off the walls, but there was none of that frantic edge that always led to drama that Jongdae always dreaded but was never able to avoid except by sticking to things short-term and light.

“You’re not allowed to look grumpy on my night of triumph,” Baekhyun said.

“Leave him alone, he just misses Minseok.”

“That’s not!” Jongdae said.

But he wasn’t able to finish it.

“Mm hmm,” Kyungsoo said.

They didn’t push it, and not long after Baekhyun gave a jaw-cracking yawn. Jongdae was a little sad to part with them out front. It really was the end of his little seaside excursion.

When he dragged out of bed the next morning, he had a text from Kyungsoo with contact information and the note “Minseok’s number.”

Jongdae was a chicken about it. He saved the contact in his phone, and he stared at it a lot, but he never called or texted. He stomped around, did his preliminary research for the Canada trip, downloaded a copy of _Anne of Green Gables_. He got called in for a meeting where Kris rumbled at him for half an hour about the need for the Canada article to be “up to usual standards,” and Jongdae could tell he was really in trouble because no lunch was involved.

He poked around in himself to see how upset he was about it and couldn’t find any.

The first part of the trip was too busy for brooding; Vancouver was beautiful, and the old Olympics site on the mountain had a million fun things to do (biathlon, tubing) and several less-fun things (bobsleigh). The rhythm of rushing around all day and writing all evening was easy to fall back into.

The train got him into trouble. It was beautiful, but it was too much time alone. The book was a children’s story that he read in a day, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Anne Shirley’s determination to be a writer, and her stubborn attachment to her adopted home, at the end of it.

He stayed in a little bed and breakfast on Prince Edward Island, smack in the middle of all the tourist stuff (and the Japanese tourists there to see it). The little house was right on the water, and the innkeepers were an older couple obviously devoted to each other. His room had white curtains that fluttered in the wind, with a writing desk set under the window. And though the beach was rocky, it made him ache – a persistent, dull discomfort under his breastbone that refused to budge. He tried to walk it away, to write it away, but when he climbed the train again, it was still there, until he rose up out of his swaying first-class bunk and stayed up drinking far too much in the dining car.

In the morning, he discovered that he’d spent 90 minutes in the middle of the night spilling everything in text messages to Minseok: his fucked-up relationships, Kris’s plan to banish him to Europe, the hollowness of it all. The beauty of Prince Edward Island, and the not-quite-rightness of the B&B.

And “I just fucking miss you” at the end.

And “Come see me, Jongdae” in answer.

He didn’t even leave Incheon – he came through passport control and went straight to a ticket desk to book a flight to Jeju. He rented a car in the hope that it would prevent nonsense, but he still had to stop at one point to let sheep cross the road.

He sat behind the wheel and laughed until he cried, then cried until he didn’t want to cry anymore, and blew his nose.

He pulled up to Frost Hostel just as the full moon had risen just above the roofline. Minseok opened the door.

“I don’t know what I want,” he said. “But I think I want you to be part of it.”

Minseok took his hand.

“Let’s figure it out,” Minseok said. “Jongdae. We can figure it out, how to not be lonely anymore.”

“Yeah, let’s do that,” Jongdae said.


End file.
